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Usually when I puchase something photographic, I take a long look at whether I really need it and eventually press the go button. In the case of the Pocket Wizard that I received this morning, the decision was made on the spur of the moment the other night when I was bored. (My boredom was related to many hours of analysing transcripts using Nvivo for my thesis)

Pocket wizard, for those of you who dont know, is a system, amongst other things, for using your flash off the camera and syncing it with the camera. You can use multiple flashes. I purchased a MiniTT1 which is a radio transmitter that fits onto the camera and also a FlexTT5 which attaches to the flash. The beauty of this kit is that any adjustments to the camera are automatically adjusted on the 'off camera' flash and the flash has full TTL functionality. The idea is that if you had multiple flashes that you would purchase additional Flex TT5s for each flash. The Flex is both a transmitter and a receiver (transceiver). There are a few other gismos that you can purchase to enable individual settings for say three flashes from your camera so that you dont have to continually move around the area making individual adjustments.

This is quite an expensive product and both cost me around $385 delivered from HKHBS who I must say delivered the items by Fed express and I ordered on Tuesday (that was the day I was bored). It appears that wedding photographers love Pocket Wizard for their reliability and coolness.

I was impressed by the plug and playness of both the Mini and the Flex and this has done a considerable amount to alleviate my boredom. There are countless and really informative Pocket Wizard videos such as those by Mark Wallace http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UZOpMGP ... ure=relmfu
Even if your're not interested in such stuff, his videos are worth watching.

To sum it up, if you need a new gadget and you have a decent flash...get a pocket wizard and light up your day...from a distance. PS I also discovered that this set up enables high speed flash and on my d7000 I can use flash up to 8000 of a second. I am not sure why I need this but it is really cool.

Anyway, just some thoughts for such a nice Friday in the Gong.

Peter Mc

petermmc wrote:PS I also discovered that this set up enables high speed flash and on my d7000 I can use flash up to 8000 of a second. I am not sure why I need this but it is really cool.

Peter, you can use this to kill ambient in broad daylight while using a small flash. Although you will need to be very close to the subject with the flash because the HSS robs you of power quite a bit.

Nice buy though. These will work for years to come. [hopefully] David Hobby has PW units that are over 15 years old. They are always backwards compatible!

Thanks Surenj,

I do quite a bit of bird photography and expect that I may be able to use this to highlight the odd bird and be far enough away not to scare them.

Peter Mc

Did you also get the AC3? That's the little part that really makes the system shine IMO.

Wink wrote:Did you also get the AC3? That's the little part that really makes the system shine IMO.

I bought a set of these a couple of weeks ago. The AC3 is a magic little box & effectively gave me an extra flash as I no longer need to keep one tethered.

However for a single flash system, it is probably overkill.

I am still getting the odd no fire, but at this stage I am still putting it down to the learning curve.
Magic system though.